National Network for Equitable Library Service

Visiting Elizabeth follows a friendship that begins and ends with a needle. Elizabeth teaches Ariane to speak her mind. So when Elizabeth is struck and killed by a car, Ariane vows to speak for two. Soon, a hybrid language rolls off her tongue. Elizabeths English and Arianes native French are woven so fine they can no longer be separated. Just like the clothes Ariane alters and sews by hand, changing form and function, she discovers irresistible connections between her two languages and cultures, charging them with new energy and rhythms.

During a camping trip, 11-year-old Lee finds herself on a rough trail in a Vancouver Island forest. Halfway to an abandoned homestead, Lee trips and is knocked unconscious. She awakens in a world unfamiliar -- all the usual landmarks have disappeared and the terrain is unpopulated except for a strange trailer and a herd of dogs. Lee investigates only to find an ornery woman at an easel who says she's Emily Carr, and a family from the Depression-torn Prairies illegally logging the island's mighty cedars.

In a tumble-down house carved out of the dunes lives an old man with second sight. He is the sifter of sands, the man who separates the sparkling mica, black lava, golden-reds, and misty grays. And as he sifts he mesmerizes Jessica and Andrew with his tales of the trickster-creator Raven and how a lonely young man lived to be 300 years old.

Advance Praise from Carol Shields, author of Unless and The Stone Diaries "I read The Moor Is Dark Beneath the Moon with great pleasure and with a particular appreciation for its narrative energy; one wants to go on turning over those pages.

With exceptional power, Robinson exposes both the gravity and levity of relationships — formed in duty, in fear, in need — and the subtle ways we attempt to escape their persistent pull. At turns humourous, chilling and tender, Robinson's fiction displays a versatility in tone and subject that mirrors the stories of our lives, real or imagined, domestic or exotic. His writing elevates the "What If?" to new imaginary heights.

In Repeat This and You’re Dead, celebrated dramatist Lawrence Russell ventures for the first time into fiction. With gritty and unforgiving realism, these "short short stories" cast a harsh eye on the Ireland of the last half of this century, a country brutally divided while fiercely loyal to an ambiguous past and an even more turbulent future.

Joan Skogan’s marvelously poetic new novel draws upon her own years adrift on the sea as a wanderer and wonderer to tell the story of Rose Bachmann, a woman at mid-tide in a life awash in the debris of a mysterious marriage, in myths both long known and newly invented and in the magical coastline of the North Pacific.Rose finds herself at rest in the rock form of a petroglyph entitled The One Who Fell From Heaven, near Prince Rupert, B.C.

Inappropriate Behaviour has a magnetism as alluring as the sirens, summoning readers to revel in the coy seduction that preludes desire, the truths women deny and the longing they supress, unleashed in startling moments of betrayal, loss, and reclamation. Mock widens the threshold–exposing a desire not only for touch, but for understanding, for family, for a love which satiates more than the physical appetite.

Kingston writer Richard Cumyn’s second book of short stories is a remarkable collection of fiction about the curse of modernity–displacement. In striking scenes Cumyn subtly explores our own sense of abandonment and loneliness in the face of change, movement and loss. Cumyn’s prose is sparse and direct, the violence supressed beneath the surface casual and foreboding. His characters are at once familiar and eerily distinct, their relationships a tender blend of heartbreak and affection.

In By the Skin of His Teeth, 17-year-old Ted MacIntosh, whom author Ann Walsh showcased earlier in Moses, Me and Murder and The Doctor’s Apprentice, befriends a young Chinese boy despite the intense prejudice seething in the frontier town. Ted suffers intimidation and violence at the hands of the cruel, arrogant Tremblay and his cronies, but with courage and conviction the young man stands up for what he believes and defends his Chinese friend.